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Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs at the Turn of the Millennium
Edited by John Bowe, Marisa Bowe, and Sabin Streeter
Crown
545 pp $25

One Hundred Jobs: A Panorama of Work in the American City
By Ron Howell
The New Press
223 pp $15.95

William Faulkner summed it up for most of us when he wrote about the constraints of working. For eight hours a day, people can't drink, eat, or make love, he said. "All you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy." And Faulkner, at least in his writer years, had a pretty good gig.

Consider the aging adjunct professor profiled in One Hundred Jobs, who races between two colleges every day for $24,000 a year. Or the frustrated artist in Gig who earns a living by hauling, with meticulous care, the "stale and depressing" work of successful artists whose ranks he will never join. Work has changed in the 34 years since Studs Terkel broke ground with his book Working, exposing the dreams, longing, and disappointment of the average worker. In the new technology-driven economy, a nobody can become a millionaire -- or, more likely, work longer and harder with no security or benefits.

Gig and One Hundred Jobs both stand on Terkel's broad shoulders, but from each book the view is decidedly different. Gig, which received considerable media attention, including a review by author Susan Faludi in the Village Voice, is the MTV version of Working. It's hip, postmillennial, and unfiltered, devoid of any messy social commentary to clutter the experience. Gig's approach reminds you of the way the Internet was supposed to transform news reporting: Get the info yourself; reach your own conclusion. This makes sense, considering who the authors are: Marisa Bowe is the founding editor-in-chief of the Web magazine Word.com, Sabin Streeter is a Word senior editor, and John Bowe, Marisa's brother, is a New York-based freelance writer and filmmaker.

The three, along with a passel of freelancers, harvested the stories of every conceivable type of work -- from a greeter at Wal-Mart to a heavy metal roadie, a buffalo rancher to a guy who's paid millions to lie in wait for a photo of Liz Taylor hooked to an IV. The subjects wrote the book themselves by simply talking in monologue about their jobs. This raw, cool approach can also be a bit of a turnoff, as if the authors handled their interviewees with asbestos mitts. As book-writing goes, it's a pretty easy gig. The hard part is finding your people. After that, you just turn on a tape recorder, transcribe the result, and stick it in a book. The problem is that once they get started talking about themselves, a lot of people don't know when to stop, and some passages just cry out for an editor with a machete.

Nonetheless, the voices in Gig tell a compelling story about how we're working and living. How, for instance, could the crime-scene cleaner earn such a good living if violent crime weren't so widespread? Where else would most of us learn the problems of a person who tries to recruit slaughterhouse workers? We might stop to notice a woman steelworker on a beam high above, but most of us will never know what her job is really like. "You bounce around hard," she says. "I can feel my disks thinning."

For so many of these folks, work is ephemeral: "I'll do this until the pressure gets too great or I physically wear out or get too old" is a recurrent theme. Today's workers are less inclined than Terkel's subjects to muddle through stoically. They are a more cynical and savvy lot, and many are frankly miserable. But some entries are funny, like the unintentionally self-parodying CEO who allows that he puts on his pants the same as any other guy. And there are those who are thrilled with their work, like the young woman filmmaker who earns the praise of Francis Ford Coppola.

Other jobs turn out to be precisely as odious as we imagine. The young woman who came to San Francisco looking for excitement, became a stripper, and destroyed her own pleasure in sex, has this to say: "You have to be extremely tough, and even then, I think it gets to you deep down. The dancers I met who said, 'I love stripping' had only been working at it for a month. Be a waitress."

If there's any sweeping truth to be gleaned from One Hundred Jobs, it's that there are an astonishing number of people working seven days a week in crummy jobs, with little hope of that changing any time this millennium. With this book, Newsday reporter Ron Howell tells the story of work in and around New York City, with much of the focus on the workers who struggle hardest to make it.

To be sure, there are profiles of a market trader and of a lawyer to the rich and powerful, but the strongest voices are decidedly those of people who are barely getting by -- the hair braider who works in her mother's basement, the squeegee man, the welfare-to-work mother, the newsstand clerk, the traffic enforcement officer (he's the poor wretch who tickets cars at expired meters and takes so much abuse on the street he wonders if he'll last long enough to collect his pension).

Where Gig is slick, One Hundred Jobs is gritty. There are typos. The black-and-white photo reproduction is often muddy, and the book feels hastily thrown together, as if Howell (a newspaperman, after all) had to meet a competitive deadline. Each profile is a 500-word essay written by Howell from his interviews. Howell, who is African American, focused heavily on the work travails of racial minorities, some of them working in his own central Brooklyn neighborhood.

At the top of each entry is a thumbnail sketch, including the person's salary, hours, benefits, job experience, and risks on the job. For people living in a major metropolis, the salaries are often shocking. The much-maligned traffic enforcement officer: $23,000 a year. The garment worker: $25,000, if she's actually paid -- and that's for 12 hours a day, six days a week. The fruit-stand guy: $15,000 a year. How do these people manage?

Howell does meet some fairly contented souls in his quest for people with balanced lives -- a bicycle messenger, a shoeshine man who lives in a residence hotel, a dog walker, a woodworker in his 60s. His book is the product of old-fashioned reporting and writing, and his empathy with the workers is clear.

"The buyouts and firings of her old friends have left her somewhat bitter," he writes about an assistant vice president and branch manager at a bank. "Plus, the bank is bringing in more and more young people with college degrees and hard-sell personalities, who are willing to work 'ungodly' hours, way beyond the 40 she puts in."

Howell also writes eloquently about an Episcopal priest who works in Harlem for $26,800 a year and constantly exhorts his congregants to fight for social and economic justice. While the risks of some jobs are easy to identify (cuts for the cook, holdups for the gas station attendant), the perils facing the priest are more ethereal. Under the job risk category for Rev. Robert Castle, Howell writes, "Challenges too great for a single soul."

The same could be said of a great many of the jobs in both of these books.

-- Elaine Herscher is a senior editor at Consumer Health Interactive.

First published March 6, 2001
Last updated March 11, 2008
Copyright © 2001 Consumer Health Interactive

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